Keyword Analysis: Using some AI to analyze Digital Media about AI

I know Artificial Intelligence is now a commonplace thing and Deep Learning, which was considered black magic only a selected few could do, is now kind of democratized (on the data and scale it would run on). However, it is becoming monopolized, but that is a topic for another blog. But since I am mostly busy reading arxiv papers (for which a similar analysis would be excellent BTW) and writing code, how do I know what the general people think of AI? What if I want to know what has been written about AI in digital media in last few months? Can AI come to aid? The answer is Yes!! Here I am trying to analyze what all different tech blogs and news sources are writing about AI, so the first thing I did was query all articles with “AI / Machine Learning” and try finding important keywords from them. Here is what I got:

top 1000 AI keywords

A lot of relevant stuff I know, but to analyze it even better, I thought of doing a breakup, month-wise and then analyzing different publishers with the different audience to see what are they covering.

Aug 2016 Keyword Analysis

August 2016 AI keyword Analysis

I start with August as this is when we started large-scale crawling of the web apart from important news sources for which we have crawled going long back. Highlights this month were: Zuckerberg demoed his Home AI assistant, Jarvis. Virtual Assistants and Self-Driving Cars are the two most established AI use cases without a doubt. Most of the digital web is about different companies which you see as keywords. A lot of keywords point towards AI techniques (supervised/unsupervised/ reinforcement / predictive analytics/ deep neural networks).

September 2016 Keyword Analysis:

September 2016 keyword Analysis

In September you can recount very easily. The keywords you see are explained below:

AI partnership formed between big 5 (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, and IBM) to advance public understanding of the sector.

Intel acquiring Nervana and Movidius.

Westworld, which is what I think is the new “Terminator” or pop description of AI.

Deepmind’s Wavenet paper which can generate very humanlike sounds.

Metamind becoming part of Salesforce Einstein

Bots, banking, and autonomous vehicles, which are areas most disruption ready through AI.

October 2016 Analysis:

October 2016 keyword Analysis

President Obama talking about AI was one of the biggest events this month. You have typical repeating terms like Deepmind, Facebook, Tensorflow etc.

November 2016 Analysis:

November 2016 keyword Analysis

November was the start of a battle for AI on the cloud. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft started coming up with their services. Also, it was the month of US elections and how AI is being used in elections (esp. Clinton campaign) was a topic of discussion. Elon Musk’s apprehensions about AI were talked about too.

December 2016 Analysis:

December 2016 keyword Analysis

Different companies coming up with different innovations in AI actually crowd the keywords (examples are Uber, Stich Fix, h20 acquisition) along with applications (healthcare, autonomous vehicles, robotics, vision). Open AI and Google launching their own reinforcement learning frameworks are also in news. Google’s massive neural machine translation breakthrough seems to be the most important of all. The rest of the keywords are our usual suspects.

January 2017 keywords:

January 2017 keyword Analysis

AI had some landmark events happening this month. An AI algorithm got better than humans at playing poker, another actually could get better than doctors than guessing skin cancer. Also, the regular keywords like virtual assistants and autonomous vehicles continue.

What we did in parallel was to choose some publishers and come up with different sources which are catering to different audiences and try to find out what they are talking about. The sources we analyzed are Business Standard, Computer World, PC World, Hackernews, Techcrunch and Forbes.

Business Standard Analysis:

Business Standard Keyword Analysis (July 2016 — Feb 2017)

Business Standard is writing for generic Indian business audience and hence talks about automation, investment, services and solutions in AI.

Computer World Analysis:

Computer World Keyword Analysis (July 2016 — Feb 2017)

Computer World is talking to computerphiles and hobbyists and hence talks about all the major events that we see coming up in the month-by-month analysis. Cyber security seems to be one use case of AI application that enthusiasts see, but it gets slightly marginalized in coverage when looking at the big picture of AI.

PC World Analysis:

PC World Keyword Analysis (July 2016 — Feb 2017)

PC World is trying to cater to a more hardware oriented audience and talks about the hardware required for AI. Check out the keywords and you might find something new in AI hardware space.

Hacker News Analysis:

Hacker News keyword Analysis (July 2016 — Feb 2017

I can most relate to the keywords our algorithm finds here (not surprisingly, I am a regular HN lurker). Software frameworks, libraries, algorithms, tips and tricks. This makes me feel like doing a similar analysis on Arxiv and /r/ml where I am even more active.

Techcrunch Analysis:

Techcrunch Keyword Analysis (July 2016 — Feb 2017)

Techcrunch keywords clearly indicate the type of audience and its catering to startup enthusiasts. Check out the keywords to see what are the topics which are being discussed about AI startups.

Forbes Analysis:

Forbes Keyword Analysis (July 2016 — Feb 2017)

Forbes, just like a business standard, seems to be talking of bigger picture so that the business readers can understand what is going on in AI.

Karna.ai is a division of ParallelDots. Karna is a social media marketing research platform. We collect and analyse millions of mentions from News, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and deliver AI driven in-depth insights through automated reports and custom analysis.